The figureheads of Brexit – Nigel Farage, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and now the newly-appointed Prime Minister Boris Johnson – are self-consciously figures of British political nostalgia. As James Meek has written, perceptively, Rees-Mogg the politician embodies a ‘steak-and-kidney pudding Edwardian Britishness’; a performance that is consciously meant to evoke a lost time on the edges of cultural memory. With his simultaneous invocation of nanny and the Morris Minor, the Victorian age and the 1920s, Rees-Mogg is a perfect embodiment of what the French critic Roland Barthes famously termed a mythology. [...]
‘This country wants nostalgia’, mused the poet and musician Gil Scott Heron in 1981, reflecting on the election of Ronald Reagan. The American electorate had voted, he thought, ‘to go back as far as they can – even if it's only as far as last week’. In this analysis, the destination of our backwards gaze is less important to this type of politics than the fact that it’s backwards we’re facing. Indeed, for Scott-Heron, this gaze peered at a fictive, mythologized vision of America, one akin to the B-movie landscape in which Reagan had made his name. Yesterday was, for Scott-Heron, ‘the day of our cinema heroes riding to the rescue at the last possible moment’, the ‘man in the white hat or the man on the white horse’. It is, tellingly, the ‘white’ cowboy that saves America at the last moment; the figure riding into our vision from out of screen shot is an idealized image of Anglo strength. ‘Come with us back to those inglorious days when heroes weren’t zeros, before fair was square, when the cavalry came straight away and all American men were like Hemingway’. Hemingway’s projected vision of white masculinity – the great white hunter – has been undermined since, of course. Actually, it was undermined by Hemingway himself, in his own writing and career. Inscribed into the Hemingway mythos are the elements of its own collapse. It is a self-consciously stagey vision of the hard-shooting, hard-drinking, hard-fighting frontiersman, a hammy performance of American maleness. [...]
In other words, the electorate are engaged at some level in a fictive transaction, where we know that what we intend to buy is indeed a counterfeit. ‘Put your orders in America,’ Scott-Heron proclaims, ‘And quick as Kodak your leaders duplicate with the accent being on the dupes’. In a song that’s about cinema and authenticity, the Kodak reference speaks of a world in which value can be quickly and cheaply reproduced. Everything about this kind of politics, then, is fake, all is surface; and at some level its supporters know they are buying the cheap copy Rolex. ‘We’re starring in a B-movie, and we would rather have had John Wayne’, sang Scott-Heron in 1981. The point about the B-movie analogy is that the form makes no real attempt to refer to a ‘real world’ beyond its borders. [...]
Taken together, these seemingly innocuous emblems and rituals – foods, images, phrases – may hide a more sinister purpose, providing feel-good cover for dangerous new forms of ethno-nationalism, protectionism and racism. Neo-fascists are nostalgic nowadays; the Italian radical right group CasaPound have reconstructed fascism as what Pietro Castelli Gattinara and Caterina Froio have characterized as a ‘hybrid communication style’. Images of Mussolini and Fascist iconography mingle with references to cultural figures sympathetic to fascist ideas, or those who might be termed proto-fascist – Ezra Pound, obviously, but also Marinetti, D’Annunzio, Sorel, Knut Hamsun, Yeats, and Nietzsche. The effect is a strange collage of nostalgic nods to the years of the Fascist ventennio and to ‘pop culture’.
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